THE THEATRE MOTHER. OF THE BR.IDE A new musical about the perils ofplanning a wedding. BY HILTON AL5 .,.,. (\1LP U -> L'- -.;\ - )' / \ .... ('Ç] \) .. ,- l:: )[ --..: vÐ V Í) @ g @<i Ó 1) @) ,. , "-> '---' o '" AZ Harvey Fierstein as the bachelor uncle in ':A CateredAifàir. " A Catered Affair" (at the Walter Kerr) is a musical based on Paddy Chayefsky's 1955 teleplay, "The Ca- tered Affair," which starred the bril- liant Brooklyn-born character actress Thelma Ritter. On the television pro- gram, Ritter played Aggie Hurley, a bossy Irish-American matriarch who longs to throw a lavish wedding for her daughter-a catered affair-and who nearly undoes her working-class fam- ily in the process. The original version, though it had been much anticipated, was a failure with the critics. (Chayef- sky had far more success composing for the big screen, winning an Acad- emy Award for screenwriting in 1955 for "Marty," and then in 1971 and 1976 for "The Hospital" and "N et- 84 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 28, 2008 work," respectively.) In a 1969 trib- ute to Ritter, Chayefskyacknowl- edged the play's pitfalls: "The first act was farce and the second was charac- ter-comedyand the third was abruptly d " H " Th ' rama. e went on, ere aren t a dozen actresses who could make one piece out of all that; Miss Ritter, of d . d " course, 1 . Indeed, it takes an exceptionally strong performer to assemble the shards of Chayefsky's kitchen- and bathroom-sink comedy-drama into a whole without destroying the slight, predictable work altogether. In 1956, Gore Vidal adapted Chayefsky's work for a film version starring Bette Davis. Davis made a credible if somewhat too funky Aggie, with a tightly fitted curly wig and impasto-thick lipstick. Vidal added new material to the script, in- cluding a fine monologue about mari- tal responsibility that brought out Da- vis's singular testiness. The film was a commercial failure, but somehow it had a profound enough effect on Harvey Fierstein so that he sought, for more than twenty years, to bring a version to the stage. (Fierstein wrote the book, and also plays Aggiès live-in bachelor brother, Winston.) Many good musicals have been in- spired by lesser material, but Fierstein's additions to the already corny story- the most significant being that Win- ston is now a gay man, and one who is surprisingly uninhibited for the Bronx in 1953-feel contrived and tacked on. In the nineteen-eighties, having estab- lished himselfin small downtown ven- ues like La MaMa, Fierstein made the leap from the East Village to Broad- way, with works like the Tony Award- winning "Torch Song Trilogy" (1982) and "La Cage aux Folles" (1983), for which he wrote the book. For a while, Fierstein was able to win us over with his moxie and his raspy voice, but now one feels merely puzzled by the fact that he seems to equate gayness with shtick. His Winston is the kind of queen who is tailor-made to charm au- diences: witty but recessive, neutered by irony. As the musical opens, Winston am- bles onstage sporting a gray fedora and a light-brown suit. He gazes at images of tenements projected across the wall behind him. After a few moments, flats representing the façade of the tene- ment where the Hurley family lives are wheeled out. (The effective, min- imal set design is by David Gallo.) Is Winston conjuring up all this scenery? Is "A Catered Affair" now Winston's memory play, his sweet revenge for having been relegated to the margins of Chayefsky's original vision? Who knows. Winston's largely silent, know- ing presence during this and other mo- ments in the production is among the many unexplained choices made by John Doyle, the director of "A Ca- tered Affair," which is alternately as obscuring as fog and as loud and dis- 0 tracting as a bag of cicadas. John Buc- chino's vague lyrics and ultimately for- gettable music are no more than an 2